Re: What is emacs architecture ?

[Fren Zeee <frenzeee@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 7:10 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
> Chad Brown writes:
>
>  > For finding a `consistent set', you're really going to want to read
>  > up on Bazaar first.  The concepts that you want here are `tags' and
>  > perhaps `branches', but I recommend that you read the overview
>  > first.
>
> Not really.  In CVS you need tags for consistency, but in Emacs
> practice in a modern VCS, pretty much every version accessible via the
> VCS is going to be "consistent" in the sense of "intended to be
> built".  Specifically, in Bazaar commits are formally synchronous
> across the whole repository (aka atomic), and Emacs practice means
> that will usually mean semantically synchronous (consistent) as well.
>
> Of course, the OP also required "released", so that narrows the field
> to tags (probably not branches).
>
> Aside: This consistency is likely to change in certain ways in the
> future, since I don't see a lot of appetite among Emacs developers for
> Linux-kernel-style rebasing before pushing, but feature branches are
> way too useful to be avoided.  So I expect that the mainline (as
> defined by bzr) will appear as a sequence of usually consistent (ie,
> buildable) revisions, with standalone commits mixed with merges.
> However, revisions on branches merged by many developers will probably
> be much less reliable, unless an explicit policy of only clean commits
> in the public repo is adopted.
>
>

This newbie thanks for your past help and looks for more till able to
contribute.

If the experts are in slight disagreement as above, let me explain
what I want to do. First, I plan to read on Bazaar in some days and
prepare a debian/ubuntu with bazaar to download the repository. I
certainly want to isolate from this big collection of the subset
directory structure of the earliest and simplest and minimal emacs. I
am not interested at this stage in any latest emacs. I want some
_qualified_ suggestions on which would be the most instructive release
to play with. This exercise at this stage is for purely educational
purpose - as we appreciate the value of pure maths, pure science and
pure research. Contributions in this way comes later with strong
inspiration. People's minds work differently.

To facilitate refererral to various versions of emacs (in the absence
of bazaar working as yet on my system) here is a chart I have. I am
wondering what kind of gui chart will bazaar show to me.

From: http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html

1985  GNU Emacs 13.0? (20-mar-85)
      by Richard Stallman.
      initial public release?
             |
      GNU Emacs 15.10 (11-apr-85)
             |
      GNU Emacs 15.34 (07-may-85)
             |
      GNU Emacs 16.56 (15-jul-85)
      (Gosling code expunged
      for copyright reasons)
             |
             |
      GNU Emacs 16.60 (19-sep-85)
      (contained first patches from
      the net, including preliminary
      SYSV support)